For the small-town loan co that we had legit late pmt in Sep 07... company was more than willing to delete the late pmt b/c DH's sis was in charge of pmts & we were overseas. He agreed there was nothing we could have done to prevent it (they are so small, they can't do auto-pays or CC payments so we had to rely on sis to walk a check in to the office once a month) and has worked to try to get the 30-day late notation removed.
For whatever reason, his staff is unable to remove the single late pmt and this is his explanation as to why: They can delete the late notation for this month, but when they submit the "tapes" (??) each month, it will just re-report as late and we'll be in a perpetual status of them removing the late notation after it reports on the CRs. I don't know how or why they would have this problem since others get late notations deleted all the time, maybe they don't have the most current reporting software or something...
So the only way to resolve it is to delete the loan entirely. We agreed to let them do this, as DH has enough credit history that it won't affect his average age too much.
If anyone has any last-minute info on how they can remove this late notation permanently w/o deleting the TL, please let us know
Good credit is good credit and we would like to hang on to it if we can.